This Week's Guests:

• Daniel Everett, professor of languages, literatures, and cultures at Illinois State University tells Boyd about his adventures as a missionary in the Amazon rain forest among the Pirahã tribe. Everett’s new book, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, talks about how the Pirahã changed his life and describes his ground-breaking discoveries about their language that challenge conventional linguistic theories.

• You wouldn’t know to look at it today, but 10,000 years ago, the Sahara was a lush, green landscape inhabited by human beings. Archeologist Elena Garcea joins Boyd in the studio to talk about the human remains and artifacts she and her team have found in an area known as the “Green Sahara.”

• National Geographic photographer Carsten Peter tells Boyd about the Cave of Crystals in Mexico that he photographed for the November issue of National Geographic magazine. Peter describes how he handled the extreme conditions he had to endure in order to take pictures of these giant crystals.

• Being a National Geographic writer/photographer is hard work—and even more so in the days before digital photos, frequent air travel, and cell phones. National Geographic writers Leah Bendavid-Val and Mark Jenkins visit Boyd in the studio to talk about four of the field writers and photographers who helped establish National Geographic’s tradition of excellence. Bendavid-Val and Jenkins profile those men in the new book, Odysseys and Photographs: Four National Geographic Field Men.

• Sable Island off the coast of Nova Scotia is known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic because of the hundreds of ships that have wrecked there. But it’s a welcoming home to tens of thousands of gray seals. Birgit Buhleier of National Geographic’s Crittercam unit joins Boyd in the studio to talk about her recent expedition to Sable Island, where she and her team attached cameras to eight gray seals in hopes of learning about their eating habits.

• Egyptologist Renee Friedman has been digging in Hierakonpolis, the southern capital of ancient Upper Egypt, for the past 25 years. Friedman joins Boyd in the studio to tell him about her discovery of an Egyptian brewery and what could be the world’s first zoo.

• Lisa Dabek is director of conservation at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Wash. Dabek tells Boyd about the work she’s doing to preserve the habitat of a rare species of tree kangaroos in Papua New Guinea.